She was feeling a sense of exaltation. Since the day at San Lazzarro she had never expected to see him again. To her he had been a glorious spirit, struggling for lost foothold on the causeways of redemption. In her mental picture he had stood always as she had seen him on the monastery path, pale, clad in a monk’s coarse robe, the vesture of earthly penance. This picture had blotted out his past, whatever it had been, whatever of rumor was true or false, whatever she may for a time have believed. Every word he had spoken remained a living iterate memory. And the thought that her hand had drawn him to his better self had filled her with a painful ecstasy.
“Teresa,” he said unsteadily, “I long ago forfeited every right to hope and happiness. And if this were not true, by a tie that holds me, and by a bond you believe in, I have still no right to stand here now. But fate drew me here to-day—as it drew me to you that morning at La Mira. It is stronger than I—stronger than us both. Yet I have brought you nothing but misery!”
“You have brought me much more than that,” she interrupted. “I knew nothing of life when I met you. I have learned it now as you must have known it to write as you have. I know that it is vaster than I ever dreamed—more sorrowful, but sweeter, too.”
A stone bench showed near, wound with moonbeams, and she sat down, making room beside her. In the white light she seemed unreal—a fantasy in wild-rose brocade. A chain of dull gold girdled her russet hair, dropping a single emerald to quiver and sparkle on her forehead. Her face was pale, but with a shadowy something born of those weeks.
What he saw there was awakened self-reliance and mettle, the birthright of clean inheritance. The wedding gondola that had borne a girl to San Lazzarro had carried back a woman, rebellious, agonized, flushed to every nerve. She had opposed a woman’s pride to the hatred that otherwise would have made the ensuing time a slow unrolling nightmare; had taken her place passively as mistress of the gloomy casa with its atmosphere of cold grandeur and miserliness, thankful that its host was niggardly of entertainment, enduring as best she might the petty persecution with which the old count surrounded her. His anger, soured by the acid sponge of jealousy, had fed itself daily with this baiting. He believed she had come smirched from the very altar to his name and place. Yet he had no proof, and to make the scandal public—to put her away—would have seared his pride, laid him open to the wrath of her kin, brought her brother back to Italy to avenge the slight upon their house, and most of all to be dreaded, would have necessitated the repayment of her dowry. A slow and secret satisfaction was all he had, and under it her spirit had galled and chafed him. In this strait she had had no confidant, for her father, aging rapidly and failing, she would not sadden, and whenever he drove to Casa Guiccioli from his villa, some miles from the town,—sole relic of his wasted properties,—had striven to conceal all evidence of unhappiness. Even when she had determined on a momentous step—a secret appeal to the papal court for such a measure of freedom as was possible—she had determined not to tell him yet. Grief and repression had called to the surface the latent capabilities which in the girl had been but promises, and these spoke now to Gordon in a beauty strong, eager and far-divining.
COUNTESS TERESA.
“What I have known of life is not its sweets,” he answered in bitterness. “I have gathered its poison-flowers, and their perfume clings to the life I live now.”
“But it will not be so,” she said earnestly. “I believe more than you told me at La Mira—when you said it had been one of your faults that you had never justified yourself. You were never all they said. Something tells me that. If you did evil, it was not because you chose it or took pleasure in it. For a while I doubted everything, but that day at San Lazzarro, when I saw you—the moment you spoke—it came back to me. No matter what I might think or hear again, in my heart I should always believe that now!”
He put out his hand, a gesture of hopelessness and protest. His mind was crying out against the twin implacables, Time and Space. If man could but push back the Now to Then, enweave the There and Here! If in such a re-formed universe, He and She might this hour be standing—no irrevocable past, only the new Now! What might not life yield up for him, of its burgeoning, not of its corruption, its hope, not of its despair!